and even as he
shoots a little ahead of the equally uncertain ground-game, he knows
approximately how to hit the cloud of his possession. So much is the
rain bound to the earth that, unable to compel it, man has yet found a
way, by lying in wait, to put his price upon it. The exhaustible cloud
"outweeps its rain," and only the inexhaustible sun seems to repeat and
to enforce his cumulative fires upon every span of ground, innumerable.
The rain is wasted upon the sea, but only by a fantasy can the sun's
waste be made a reproach to the ocean, the desert, or the sealed-up
street. Rossetti's "vain virtues" are the virtues of the rain, falling
unfruitfully.

Baby of the cloud, rain is carried long enough within that troubled
breast to make all the multitude of days unlike each other. Rain, as the
end of the cloud, divides light and withholds it; in its flight warning
away the sun, and in its final fall dismissing shadow. It is a threat
and a reconciliation; it removes mountains compared with which the Alps
are hillocks, and makes a childlike peace between opposed heights and
battlements of heaven.

THE TOW PATH

A childish pleasure in producing small mechanical effects unaided must
have some part in the sense of enterprise wherewith you gird your
shoulders with the tackle, and set out, alone but necessary, on the even
path of the lopped and grassy side of the Thames--the side of meadows.

The elastic resistance of the line is a "heart-animating strain," only
too slight; and sensible is the thrill in it as the ranks of the
riverside plants, with their small summit-flower of violet-pink, are
swept aside like a long green breaker of flourishing green. The line
drums lightly in the ears when the bushes are high and it grows taut; it
makes a telephone for the rush of flowers under the stress of your easy
power.

The active delights of one who is not athletic are few, like the joys of
"feeling hearts" according to the erroneous sentiment of a verse of
Moore's. The joys of sensitive hearts are many; but the joys of
sensitive hands are few. Here, however, in the effectual act of towing,
is the ample revenge of the unmuscular upon the happy labourers with the
oar, the pole, the bicycle, and all other means of violence. Here, on
the long tow-path, between warm, embrowned meadows and opal waters, you
need but to walk in your swinging harness, and so take your friends up-
stream.

You work merely as the mill-str